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Arena is the first episode of the TES saga. Despite a rather linear plot for the main quest, Arena still allows you to explore
many secondary quests, in 275 places (cities, dungeons, ...) dispatched in a huge open map.
Side quests will make your avatar gain experience, improve stats, or grab powerfull weapons which will be useful
for the main quest.
To have an idea of the game field: Tamriel is composed of 9 provinces:
- 8 provinces each having 8 cities, 8 towns, 16 villages, and 2 dungeons
- and the "Imperial Province" having 1 city and 2 dungeons
In the download section, you'll find :
- the 3D meshes of the 275 places, in Microsoft ".x" format
- the videos (intro, end, ...)
- all the bitmaps used in the game
- and other ressources
Download
***SPOILER*** - The 3D meshes of the 275 places (~200 MB) :
ex: Imperial Dungeons (game start)
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In dungeons :
- I chose to remove the ceilings above rooms and corridors, in order to
highlight only the places where the player can actually go.
In cities :
- I added ceilings to houses. It seems that they didn't have any because you can't see
them in the game (you can't jump high enough to see the top of 1-floor houses, nor can you see through
windows from higher floors to watch smaller buildings from above). I guess it was a kind of optimization,
but in my scenes it led to houses beeing "open" on their top, therefore I arbitrarily chose a floor texture
to fix this in my 3D files.
- The game re-uses the basics city blocks by combining them randomly to build many different cities. Each of these blocks can be
affected different texture sets in order to simulate different weather (depending on the region and the current weather).
I chose an "average" weather in my 3D files: I applied textures for a "Temperate" region (not "Desert" nor "Mountain") with a "Normal" weather (not "Rain" nor "Snow").
...Maybe later I'll generate all combinations...
In Palaces :
- The game only provides with 9 different Palaces (3 for the 64 cities, 3 for the 64 towns, and 3 for the 128 villages).
Therefore the same Palaces are often re-used, with however a few customizations to make each of them "unique" in each place:
the game changes the name and gender (male/female) of the Palace's ruler.
I chose to arbitrarily generate the Palaces with a "King" ruler (if you find this misogynous, tell me and I'll replace with a "Queen" bitmap...)
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About doors in dungeons :
Although you can orient yourself smoothly in any direction, the maps are made of square tiles.
Moreover each door is bound to a tile: not to a specific border of the tile but to the whole tile. The game's algorithm will draw a door on any side of the tile which doesn't have a wall on the opposite tile.
For each "door tile", the designers therefore put walls on 2 opposites sides of the tile, leaving the 2 other sides free for drawing a door.
Finaly the game will always draw the door on the nearest side from the player: therefore if you go around the tile then the door will seem to have moved to the other side! Try and you'll see!
Another easy way to witness this is to:
- face a closed door
- open it (it'll rotate away on the left)
- rotate 90° left
- slide right (the open door is now along the wall in front of you)
- as soon as you reach the center of the door's tile, you'll see the door disappear!
- if you half-turn, you'll notice that it moved to the opposite border of its tile!
Yes, you can actually see this 'conception bug' while playing the game!
In order to match as close as possible the game's design, I arbitrarily chose to put the doors to their 2 possible locations (this never happens in the game), it may seem strange but I didn't want to arbitrate with a single door in the middle of the tiles.
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The videos (intro, end, ...) (.AVI)
Original videos from Floppy version
Enhanced and extra videos from CD-ROM version
Bitmaps :
still bitmaps
animated bitmaps
fonts
Audio
Text
Links
Remakes :
- OpenTESArena by Aaron "afritz1" (...work in progress)
Thanks to Aaron for providing his source code on GitHub, this helped me understand some of the data formats that I needed
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